Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Last week I was at FOSS4G-NA in Washington DC. It was my first time in DC, and my first FOSS4G as a member of the OpenGeo team. Both were very pleasant experiences!

One of the keynotes was by Josh Berkus of PostgresQL talking about "firehose databases". FOSS4G is always a firehose conference, and this one was no exception. I missed many more talks than I wanted to take in, for various reasons - the 3 simultaneous tracks, my own commitments to talks and OpenGeo work, and often because it's just such a good chance to talk to great people from all around the FOSS4G world.

Here are some of the my conference highlights:

another inspiring keynote from Paul Ramsey, on the origins and future of open source

the Ignite Spatial talks, which were fast, fascinating and funny

a panel discussion which hit on the need for a replacement for the shapefile (PLEASE!)

hearing Josh Berkus talk about the impressive new features coming in PostgresQL 9.2 (JSON, index-only scans, SP_GIST, to name a few)

talking to Josh Marcus about GeoTrellis, an engine for scalable geoprocessing

talks on using NoSQL DBs such as MongoDB and HBase for storing and querying spatial data

a discussion with Javier de la Torre of CartoDB about the need for a spatially-sensitive sampling technique (a la Oracle's SAMPLE clause) in PostGIS. We ended up discussing this with Josh Berkus (since he was sitting at the next table!) and apparently there is some work starting on this in PostgreSQL. Hopefully this will extend to spatial datasets as well.